James O'Keefe "punks" himself, shows himself once more to be a cheap sleazebag

James O'Keefe, the Andrew Breitbart protege who snookered the national media and the US Congress with his deceptively edited video on the (non-defunct) community activist group ACORN, got caught trying a disturbing plan to embarass and discredit CNN reporter. (Scott Zamost, Fake pimp from ACORN videos tries to 'punk' CNN correspondent CNN 09/29/2010)

John Cole It’s This SimpleBalloon Juice 09/29/2010 reminds us of the context in which this occurred:

These are wingnut activists feeding a wingnut audience. Any video he got from the boat would have been "proof" of whatever they claimed it would be. These are the folks who took a video of Shirley Sherrod rejecting racism and used it to… call her a racist. These are the folks who had Acorn officials fired for ... calling the authorities when they went in and pretended to be sex traffickers and the Acorn folks did the right thing.

All they needed was videotape of anything involving Abbie Bordreaux [sic] on that boat. It doesn't matter if she was repulsed or what she actually did, they would lie and edit the video and it would become whatever they wanted it to be. The wingnut blogs would all circulate it, Howie Kurtz and Fox news would mainstream it, the WaPo Ombudsman would three weeks later issue an apology for not looking into the sluts at CNN earlier, and the Politico would have a dozen "thought" pieces up discussing how this is bad news for Obama and Democrats.

When you make up your own reality and have a media that refuses to call you on your bullshit, the sky is the limit. The video didn't have to have any evidence, it just had to exist. The wurlitzer [the Republican noise machine] could then turn it into whatever they wanted.

He notes that conservative blogs are notably uninterested in this story about the guy who has been one of their heroes.